compensation or co-optation - biodiversity offsets · biodiversity offsetting has the potential to...
TRANSCRIPT
Compensation or Co-optation:
Risk of Cost-shifting in Compensatory Afforestation in
India
Divya Narain
&
Dr. Martine Maron
Session: European perspectives and global challenges on achieving no net loss of biodiversity in the context of development
About the Paper
Policy perspective that takes the case of biodiversity offsetting in India to highlight the risk of cost-shifting and violation of additionality
Letter-length version published by Science
Biodiversity Offsetting and the Risk of Cost-shifting
Biodiversity offsetting compensates for development-induced biodiversity losses through conservation gains elsewhere - overall goal of ‘no net loss’
Biodiversity offsetting has the potential to bridge global conservation finance gap • channelize private-sector funding • one of CBD’s six innovative financial mechanisms
Cost-shifting can jeopardize biodiversity offsets as a source of conservation
finance i.e. offset funds displace existing/pledged finance (Pilgrim & Bennun,
2014)
How Cost Shifting can play out
Governments can:
1. actively cut down funding for management of protected areas in anticipation of offset funding (Pilgrim & Bennun, 2014)
2. create new protected areas using the offset funding and claim them as conservation gains without parallely reporting biodiversity loss caused by project development (Maron et al. 2015)
3. use offset funds to fulfill conservation commitments made under
international agreements such as the UNFCCC and CBD (Maron et al. 2015)
Biodiversity Offsetting and Additionality
Offset funding should be additional to existing/forthcoming funding obligations – a widely-accepted principle called additionality (BBOP, 2009;
Maron el al. 2015; McKenney & Kiesecker, 2010)
Ensuring additionality: measure offset gains against a counterfactual
scenario that captures potential threats + potential protection/restoration measures
a realistic counterfactual would include any pre-existing conservation commitments of the government offset should be additional to such commitments (Maron et al. 2015)
Biodiversity Offsetting and Violation of Additionality
Requirement of additionality often explicit in offsetting legislations e.g. China’ Forest Vegetation Restoration Fee is prohibited from being used for purposes other than restoration
Cost shifting violates additionality – funds conservation actions that would have happened anyway no additional conservation takes place
biodiversity loss remains uncompensated net loss of biodiversity
India has a national-level regulatory biodiversity offsetting regime
Indian Parliament passed a new law that allows cost-shifting – this paper considers potential consequences of this law
Offsetting Mechanism in India
India, a ‘megadiverse’ country, is home to 7-8 % of all recorded species
Annual GDP growth rate of around 7.5%, India is the fastest-growing emerging economy in the world (IMF, 2016)
With one-fifth of the global population packed into one-fiftieth of world’s
land area (WEF, 2011), nowhere else in the world is the development vs. conservation battle more pronounced
Development projects that involve deforestation are regulated by India’s Forest Conservation Act (FCA), 1980 - developers required to pay cost of compensatory afforestation
Policy Paralysis
35 years since the enactment of FCA - successive governments have failed
to put in place an institutional mechanism to utilize compensatory levies
In spite of repeated judicial intervention, compensation funds INR 40000 crores (approx. USD 5.7 billion) lying unutilized
Compensatory Afforestation Fund Bill, 2015 (CAF Bill, 2015) seeks to resolve this inertia – provide requisite statutory framework to unlock funds
Cost Shifting/Violation of Additionality
in Compensatory Afforestation
Diversion of compensation funds to implement Green India Mission – Provision of CAF Bill, 2015
Green India Mission – a massive afforestation program • National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC) under the UNFCCC • use towards fulfillment of Aichi Biodiversity Targets 5 and 15 under UN-
CBD
FCA, 1980 explicit about additionality: “The compensatory afforestation should clearly be an additional plantation activity and not a diversion of part of the annual plantation programme”
Cost Shifting/Violation of Additionality
in Compensatory Afforestation
Initially, INR 6000 crores (about USD 900 million) proposed for diversion - this sum can afforest about 1.2 mha
Compensatory afforestation of 1.2 mha will be forgone, leaving an uncompensated net loss of almost all of the 1.48 mha deforested under FCA since 1980
Projected Net Loss of Forest Cover resulting from CAMPA funds diversion to GIM
Recommendations
Compensatory afforestation funds must not be diverted to the Green India Mission - should be used strictly for compensatory afforestation,
Resulting forest cover gains should be measured and reported against a baseline that includes afforestation planned under the Green India Mission
To avoid double counting, there should be separate accounting for the spending on compensatory afforestation and that on the Green India Mission
Divya Narain Independent Researcher and Consultant
(Business and Biodiversity; Conservation Finance)
Dr. Martine Maron ARC Future Fellow and Associate Professor, School of
Geography, Planning and Environmental Management The University of Queensland